Don't let them mess up your face

 

This is me, age 66. The rock star Madonna is two years younger than me, and I am stunned to realize after her appearance at the Grammys on the weekend that I now prefer my face to hers, so altered has hers become from years of cosmetic surgery and treatments.

This face of mine has been creamed, scrubbed, exfoliated, masked and otherwise fussed over for a very long time. I am as disappointed as any person who comprehends the social capital of physical attractiveness to be experiencing the unwanted changes that aging brings. 

But having watched one beautiful celebrity after another succumb to the disaster of costly and invasive "anti-aging" procedures, I concluded many years ago that I will never do anything beyond the superficial to try to appear younger. 

It's not out of any noble belief in being my "natural self." As you can see from my photo, my hair is coloured, and I am pretty sure it will be until the day I die. I wear eye makeup and have since age 12, and don't even leave the house for the morning dog walk without it on. I got my eyebrows tattooed in 2009 and love them. You'll never catch me singing the praises of a natural look. 

Nor is it out of a determination to grow old gracefully. If I could take a magic pill guaranteed to firm up my neck, jawline and eyelids with no side-effects, I would be seriously tempted, and admit to moments in front of the mirror in which I pull my face skin tighter and lament out loud about how much younger I look.

But here's the thing about invasive cosmetic procedures, as Madonna's 2023 face so tragically reminds us: It's a pact with the Devil. You're going to trade off your future old face for an "improved" face now, and you're going to do that repeatedly as the relentless aging process drags your skin lower to the ground no matter how many procedures you throw at it.

And then one day, you cross some line of having had way too many procedures, and there's no way back. Alas, you still don't look young, you just look like an aging woman who has had way too many cosmetic procedures. 

I get that celebrities must feel the pressure to keep up their beauty, though I would have thought more of them would have noticed by now that the work really dries up once your face starts looking altered (Melanie Griffith, I'm talking to you.)

But why I am seeing so many non-celebrities - and so many young women - getting sucked in? Don't they have eyes to see all the wealthy celebrities with their ruined faces? If famous, rich people with access to top-of-the-line surgeons still end up looking like unrecognizably bizarre cat-people with painfully distorted lips, isn't that a pretty blatant warning to any of us to just stay away from this crap?

We fight very hard to look younger than our age, as evidenced by a global anti-aging market now valued at $62.6 billion US and a $67 billion cosmetic surgery market. There are many theories about why that is so, from evil marketing strategies and ruthless capitalists to the patriarchy.

I know from my own experience that an aging woman no longer draws the Male Gaze (a sad-happy loss for me), and that ageism in your work life is a real thing. The world does view you differently, and makes many strange assumptions once having registered you as "old." I clearly remember the grand insult I felt back in my 50s when some twerp salesman at the computer store leaned in close to ask if I knew what a flash drive was.

But to cut, inject and fill your face with weird chemicals and poisons in reaction to the social realities of aging? And all of it to end up with a face so obviously distorted that you're literally the poster child for aging really, really poorly? What theory explains that?

If you are a younger woman reading this, and I hope you are, I will tell you straight up that it's painful to experience your physical beauty fading. Not to brush off the years of catcalls, unwanted attention and outright sexual harassment as an easy time for women, but being attractive does have its privileges. As someone who for so many years counted on turning heads to get me feeling good about myself, I've found it hard to relinquish the dopamine rush of being checked out.

But all the cosmetic procedures in the world won't change any of that. In fact, they only make things worse, because soon enough you just look like a freaky-faced woman with too much disposable income who is desperate to not look as old as you are. Who wants to be that person?

So embrace yourself as those visible changes creep in and get over it. We don't expect an old dog to look like a puppy. Stay fit, don't smoke, keep the alcohol to a minimum and drink lots of water. Spend some time contemplating the old women all around you and you'll see that it's possible to look good AND old at the same time. 

And let me assure you, there are a lot of perks to growing invisible. Count that one as a secret aging super-power.

Don't you be calling me adorable: A reflection on ageism

These are times of calling people on their shit. So I’m going to call out ageism, and more specifically that insidious kind I think of as “compliment-based ageism,” which I’m now experiencing in my own life.

Some recent examples: I scrambled up the rock at my favourite Upper Thetis swimming hole a few days ago and a woman watching me from the top told me what a good climber I was. When travelling, my partner Paul and I notice that younger travellers have taken to praising us as “inspiring.” Last night as I was cycling up a hill coming home from work, a woman walking past called out, “Good for you!”

Good for me? I’ve ridden that hill I don’t know how many times, with nobody applauding my tenacity. I’ve scrambled up those rocks for almost 30 years, and nobody’s ever called me a good climber before. I’m still travelling the way I’ve always travelled, which did not attract attention as inspirational until recently.

What’s changed? I passed some invisible line where people started to see me as old. It started in the runup to turning 60, so the last couple of years. Maybe the neck wrinkles got to be too much, the thicker torso – I don’t know, but it was like somebody hung a “Plucky old lady!” sign on my back, and all of a sudden everything got weird.

We think of ageism as affecting employment and how we’re viewed as workers, and you’ll get no argument from me about that. But having people say kind things about you that are nonetheless distinctly ageist is really no better. Those kind words lay the foundation for a damaging belief: That people become less able, less engaged, less interested in the world as they age, and thus we should celebrate the rare older person who is the exception proving the rule.

You might be thinking, “Come on, Jody, now you’re going to crab at people for saying nice things, too?” Yeah, I guess I am. I’d make the case that they’re not actually saying nice things. What their comments make me feel like is that they’re observing me as spectacle - an aging woman acting against type, like a dancing bear. It’s not a good feeling.

I posted a photo on Facebook of Paul and me at an event on behalf of sex workers’ rights a few months back, and somebody called us “adorable.” I took it like a blow.

Adorable is a cute word for babies and toddlers, but for someone who’s still very much engaged in trying to change the world, it’s a kick in the pants. Does anybody change the world by being adorable? I don’t think so. Adorable is toothless and dear - a sweet old geezer who nobody needs to listen to anymore, an endearing example of a harmless oldster looking “cool” by standing up for edgy causes.

(Nobody has yet used “feisty” to my face so far, another old-person-specific word, but I’m bracing for that to happen as the years accumulate. That first feisty is going to be grim.)

There is an easy solution here: Cut it out. People in this modern day know how to catch themselves on thoughts relevant to all those “isms” that are (rightly) no longer tolerated. Ageism has been on the list for quite some time, but we clearly need more work on the sneaky kind that wears a friendly face.

Please, allow me to help.

For one, don’t ever tell anyone they look good for their age. In fact, strike “for your age” right out of your vocabulary. If they look good, just say that, and say it to other people of any age if they look good as well.

Any compliment that ends with “for your age” is both a back-handed insult to the person receiving it (“Wow, I’d expected you to look like a wreck at your advanced years!”) and a direct insult to anyone in the maligned age group used for comparison. Also, stop if you hear yourself telling a story and saying something like, “So then some grandma type comes along and says…”

Compliment people for what they do, of course, as you might at any age. But if the only thing striking is that they’re old doing a “young” thing, either ignore them entirely like you would anyone else or just give a friendly nod and say something neutral, like, “That’s quite the hill, isn’t it?”

Don’t presume to know what old people are like. Isn’t that the principle underlying every “ism”? We have visible differences, but they don’t explain the person within. We work to train ourselves not to “see” a person’s exterior in matters of race, religion and gender; we need to think the same way when looking at older people. I am still the same person I always was – it’s YOU who think me different, and for no reason other than my appearance.

If you are older yourself, don’t allow words of self-denigration to come out of your mouth. Every time you attribute anything to growing old – aching joints, inability to do a somersault, puzzlement at all this new-fangled technology that the kids are using these days – you confirm the cultural belief that older people are doomed to become useless (albeit adorable) shells of the vigorous, competent people they once were.

Joints can ache at any age. I was never good at somersaults. We must not let the stigmatizing view of older people – powerless, ineffectual, weak, a burden - colour how we view ourselves.

So if you compliment me on my form one day as I cycle past and you think you hear a muttered “Fuck off!” in response, at least now you know where it’s coming from. Just chalk it up to me being feisty.

Should I forget who I am, please give me the music to remind me

 

     If you haven’t already seen the 2014 documentary “Alive Inside,” fire up Netflix tonight and watch it. And as soon as it’s done and you’ve mopped up what might very well be a small bucket of sad-happy tears at all the lives changed by something so small, you just might want to get started on your own music playlist.

     The documentary is about a quest to give people back their music, most especially those living with dementia in U.S. care homes.

     The film opens with a scene of a near-comatose, non-verbal old man being outfitted with a headset and iPod loaded with all his favourite music, and his instant transformation into a wide-eyed, smiling guy singing along and recalling a dozen stories from his youth. (Maybe you were one of the 2 million people who viewed the clip on YouTube?)

     Anyway, it’s an amazing scene, but there are many more equally powerful ones in the full documentary. I felt like evangelizing after I saw the film. I wanted to start calling up care homes in Canada to ask if anyone was doing something similar, and how I could help. Anyone who ran into me in the days that followed had to put up with me exhorting them to see the film.

     And then I got thinking about what songs some good-hearted person might put on my own personal playlist should the day come when I can no longer remember who I am. That kind of freaked me out.

     I mean, what if the nice people looking after me presumed that because I was a teenager in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that’s the only kind of music I want to hear? I’m sure grooving to The Night Chicago Died or Sylvia's Mother would bring a smile to my face, but being stuck until I died in the memories of my early teenhood would be its own kind of nightmare.

     If the goal is to evoke the memories of a lifetime, who but me really knows what those songs are? I’m practically like the guy in the movie “High Fidelity,” with a different signature song for each profound memory. But it’s not like I share much of that with people as a general rule. (“Hey, honey, did I ever tell you that even 45 years on, hearing Me and Mrs. Jones makes me feel nostalgic for the boy who first broke my heart?”)

    Were I to be heading into the dark night of dementia, I’m pretty sure I’ll want all the memories I can get my hands on. Which means I’d best get my list together.

     I doubt that even my kids would think to include Blue Rodeo’s Rose-Coloured Glasses, which would deny me a magical day in my late 20s when my three young kids and I were singing that song at the top of our lungs after a day on Denman Island, and I suddenly felt free for the first time in my life. No one would know to put on Bob Seger’s version of  the Tom Waits song Blind Love, which would mean I’d never go back again to those three weeks in 2013 when the bar in the scary little Moskitia town I was staying in mixed that song in with its many narco-corridos, and I felt less lonely.

     Just When I Needed You Most – my son’s first heartbreak, and an important memory for me because I realized for the first time that my own heart would be breaking right along with my children’s as life brought its cruel lessons. Murder In The City  – the song that made us laugh through our anxiety as we headed into our big Honduras adventure. One Hand In My Pocket – me and a vanload of Grade 7 girls coming back from my daughter’s field trip, stereo cranked so loud that we proudly earned a look of disapproval from a fellow motorist at a red light.

     Bizarre Love Triangle, the stripped-down Frente! version that made me cry and cry in my early days with Paul because I thought he’d put it on a mixed tape he made for me as a hint about how he felt about our relationship (when in fact, he’d just recorded a whole Unplugged album that it happened to be on). Teddy Thompson’s I Don’t Want to Say Goodbye,  because it conjures a misty morning kayaking in Saanich Inlet when I was listening to it on my headphones as geese took flight, and I paddled through the breathlessly still waters thinking that if I were making a movie of that moment, that song would be perfect for the soundtrack. Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, because my grandsons (and Paul) still love retelling the story of me hearing that song on a road trip to Idaho and mishearing the chorus as, “Grew up on Mexican hockey.”

     At any rate, you get the picture. My personal playlist is deeply personal, and in all likelihood will span all the decades of my life. So yeah, please do throw some Beatles in there, but don’t forget Sweet Cherry Wine  or Which Way You Going, Billy? Don’t forget ACDC, because nothing puts me back on the road with the 2001 Tour de Rock quicker than the distinctive opening of Thunderstruck.  Don’t forget Barbie Girl, because I know I'm going to want to think back on the sweetly astounding sight of my very serious and quiet five-year-old grandson dancing like he was possessed when he first heard that song.

     May the gods trigger someone who loves me to go carefully through whatever musical catalogue I’m keeping at the point that I start to lose myself, and find a way to give it all to me.

     Even better, they could throw in some new songs that will be the background for whatever memories I’m laying down during those intense final months or years. Nothing would make me happier than to be listening to some cool new tune when the end finally comes, and thinking to myself, “Wow, what a perfect song to remember the moment I died.”

     Now go watch “Alive Inside.” And may your greatest-life-hits list be as fun to remember as mine has been.

In my mother's house

 

  My mother throws dinner parties four times a week. Add in three weekly lunch parties, afternoon teas with various friends, and crib at odd hours with the little collection of men my mother has organized to play with her, and it has been a bit like living in a community centre since we moved in to her apartment at the beginning of the month.

    While Mom’s love for social engagements and constant preparation of meals is foreign to me, it’s been quite interesting to see all of it in action after moving in on our return from Honduras.  A lot of the guests are seriously old – last week, a 94-year-old drove over with his 96-year-old friend for tea – but every one of them challenge that stereotype of creaky, bent-back oldsters with nothing to say. They are a saucy, styling, joke-telling, life-appreciating bunch, Mom and all her buddies.

    Soon to be 89, my mother has suffered many blows to her mobility ever since she was hit by a car in a crosswalk 12 years ago. But between her pathological sociability and drive to work harder, harder, harder as if you just might beat that whole aging thing down forever with enough focus, she has figured out how to stay in the game by bringing people to her. She can’t comfortably get out of the apartment as easily as she once did, but no matter because the people now come filing in, carrying their meatloaf and their baked treats and their bottles of wine for sharing.

    Schooled by my mother’s regular declarations of how much she hates gifts of flowers or plants, they now come with pounds of butter, big cans of nuts, boxes of chocolate. Living here these past three weeks has been like constant Christmas, what with all the good food always lying around.

    In return, Mom makes everybody a darn fine meal, typically in the classic meat-potatoes-and-dessert style that those of her age are accustomed to, but with a lot of variety. She knows a thousand ways to serve leftovers. She can stretch a turkey like you can’t believe. A stickler for a good deal, my mother prides herself on managing all this sociability on a mere $6 a day, although she mentioned the other day that she’s soon going to have to adjust that limit higher. Having friends who are constantly coming through the door with something yummy in their hands certainly helps.

    Even as I write this, I've got my laptop squeezed into a corner of the huge dining room table my mother has set for tonight’s 9-person dinner party, and she will soon be nagging me into the TV room so she can adjust the place setting I have pushed into the centre of the table. On Tuesday, she’s having another dinner party for 11. Then there’s the regular Wednesday lunch gig with neighbours she used to live with back at her former apartment, and the regular Thursday night gig with “my boydies,” as she calls the four men who play crib with her regularly.

    I think she’s crazy to be doing it all. But hey, it keeps her happy. It keeps her busy. It keeps her gossiping and telling jokes and having a lot of remember-the-time-when conversations with people she has known for a very long time. Meanwhile, the friends are keeping busy too, having to get into their own kitchens to make something to share at the next gathering and then out the door to eat it. They come carefully through Mom’s apartment door with their walkers and their canes and their crutches, but pretty soon they’re all laughing and maybe forgetting for a little while about that aging body that doesn’t get them around like it used to.

    I think I’m too much of an introvert to be able to follow Mom’s path into healthy aging. But I admire her style. I admire her ability to create a full, rich life in one of the most isolation-prone life stages. I admire her commitment to exhausting herself as testament that she can still kick out the jams.

    And the food’s good.

Stereotypes getting in way of good care for seniors

This is a column about my mom, and the crazy things that can happen when you take ill at 83.
My mother is a retired nurse who has done everything right in terms of looking after her health all these years. Despite mobility challenges since being hit by a car in a crosswalk seven years ago, she’s still very much a “tough old broad,” as a friend once described her.
But as our family has now come to see, in the eyes of our depersonalized and harried health-care system, she’s just Old Person No. 347,050 on a very long list. And from what she’s been hearing from her friends, that’s just how it is once you cross some invisible line into old age.
She has no chronic health conditions. She isn’t on any long-term medication. Up until two months ago, she was travelling, cooking dinner for one friend or another virtually every night she was home, and was an active, engaged community volunteer.
Then we went on a family holiday to Tofino in June. She got too much sun one day and went to bed feeling sick. Perhaps she slept too heavily on her bad arm - the accident left her with a broken shoulder and severe limitations in the use of her right arm. At any rate, she awoke the next day with major pain in her arm.
It’s been one strange ride ever since, starting with the prescription drug she was given to reduce inflammation - which lived up to its potential to cause “a general feeling of illness” as one of its side-effects.
By the time she figured that out and quit the drug, she’d developed blood-sugar problems and was showing diabetes-like symptoms. (With any luck, that was a side-effect of the drug as well, because they’ve since stopped.)
And wouldn’t you know it, my mother’s trusted family doctor retired just as all of this got underway. That put her into the care of the doctor who’d just bought the practice.
They’d never met before my mother came in about the pain in her arm. The physician knew nothing of the vigorous, active woman my mother had been just a few days earlier, and didn’t bother to ask. I’m guessing the doctor just saw a tired, sick 83-year-old with a bum shoulder - one who had yet to come to grips with her pain and illness as the byproducts of aging.
OK, I get that. So does my mom. She recognizes that she’s in the countdown. She won’t be looking for medical heroics when her time comes.
But there’s a fine line between expecting people to accept the aging process and relegating them to assembly-line care that presumes they’ll soon be dead anyway. That’s how it has felt for my mother these past two months.
Her saga was complicated by a much-anticipated cruise to Alaska in early July, which she desperately wanted to go on. The x-ray of her shoulder found nothing untoward and the doctors didn’t seem too interested in exploring the issue further, so she mustered her strength to go on the cruise. She still didn’t know whether the diabetes-like problems she’d experienced were a reaction to the anti-inflammatory she’d taken, but figured results from the blood-sugar tests would be ready when she returned.
And they were. But by then she’d caught some terrible flu-like thing that had morphed into a secondary bronchial infection, as had her sister on the final days of the cruise. (Could it be swine flu? My mother is on Day 21 of what she describes as the worst illness of her life, and nobody has even suggested she be tested for it.)
So the bronchial infection was the more pressing issue by the time she got home. In B.C., you’re only allowed one health concern per visit these days when you go to the doctor, which meant her doctor listened to her chest but then refused to review her blood-sugar results until a later appointment.
Her active life has ground to a halt over the past two months. Depression crept in. Fortunately, all those friends she cooks for have come through for her. And the really good news is that so much time has passed since her arm first started to hurt that the original problem appears to have resolved itself. I think she’s going to be fine.
I wouldn’t say the system failed her; she got drugs, tests and an x-ray. But all of it came grudgingly, as if done just to silence a frail old lady who hadn’t come to grips with her own mortality. Come on, docs - look past those aging bodies to the people who are still very much alive inside them.

Nothing beautiful about cosmetic surgery
Sept. 28, 2007

We ought to be grateful for people like Krista Stryland and Micheline Charest, whose sad deaths present an opportunity for all women to reflect on the demons that send us searching for happiness through surgery.
Stryland died last week in Toronto of a heart attack after undergoing liposuction, in which a thin, sharp instrument is rammed repeatedly into your body to break up pockets of fat. Charest died in Montreal in 2004 following six unconscious hours on the operating table being sliced, diced and skinned in the pursuit of “beauty.”
Death is merely the worst-case scenario on a laundry list of ugly possibilities when it comes to cosmetic surgery, mind you. So I’m grateful too to celebrities like Cher, Joan Rivers, Burt Reynolds, and legions more. One glimpse of their mannequin-like faces is all it takes to remind me of the mighty price people pay for thinking they can get one over on the aging process.
We can talk all we like about whether general practitioners should be allowed to call themselves cosmetic surgeons and start operating on people in their private clinics, as happened to Stryland. That seems to be the major theme in the news coverage of her death this week, and it’s certainly an important point in provinces that haven’t sorted that out yet (B.C. already has).
Or we can cut to the chase and ask ourselves what in hell is going on with us.
Why do more than a quarter of a million Canadian women undergo some kind of cosmetic “enhancement” procedure every year in an attempt to feel more attractive? Why do Canadians spend more than half a billion dollars annually having ourselves tightened, tucked, lasered and poisoned in the elusive - and ultimately hopeless - pursuit of youth?
The self-loathing that characterizes so much of the female experience in this day and age has now spread to men, who once seemed virtually immune to such dangerous vanities. But while the number of men seeking solace through cosmetic surgery may be on the rise, 85.5 per cent of the Canadians undergoing the procedures in any given year are female.
Men tend to come looking for a better nose, or less droopy eyelids. Women have different goals: Less fat; bigger breasts; fewer wrinkles. The procedure that Stryland was undergoing, liposuction, is the most requested cosmetic surgery among Canadian women, accounting for a quarter of the total surgical market.
Cosmetic enhancement has become so popular, in fact, that a loan company in Toronto now more or less specializes in lending money to people wanting to be operated on. Medicard lends money to people facing a bill for an unfunded medical procedure, three-quarters of whom have are people wanting cosmetic enhancements.
In 2004, Medicard surveyed 1,000 doctors doing that work. The survey produced some of the first hard numbers specific to the thriving cosmetic-enhancement industry in Canada.
The numbers are pretty frightening. Almost 25,000 Canadians a year are having liposuction. Some 17,000 women a year get their breasts enlarged. More than 100,000 doses of the botulism toxin are injected annually into people happy to pay for the privilege of getting rid of a few wrinkles by having their facial muscles paralysed.
Cosmetic procedures overall rose almost 25 per cent in Canada between 2002 and 2003, Medicard reports. In the U.S., the growth in the industry is staggering: close to 11 million Americans now undergo cosmetic procedures in a typical year, an increase of almost 500 per cent in the past decade.
Our sisters down south are even more enthusiastic than we are about putting themselves in harm’s way for the sake of false youth and beauty. Women account for 91.4 per cent of the U.S. market, which now drives an industry worth close to $12.5 billion.
Why are we doing this to ourselves? We like to blame the fashion industry, or Hollywood, or all those magazines endlessly haranguing us to lose 10 pounds by Christmas/summer/next week. The cult of youth, the anorexic runway models - what can a girl do but try to keep up?
But we wouldn’t respond to the negative messaging if we were confident in our own skins. If we weren’t so tragically uncertain about our own worth, all the images in the world of skinny, airbrushed, smooth-skinned 20-year-olds wouldn’t ruffle us a bit.
Were we whole to begin with, we wouldn’t be here wondering why a happy, fit young mom would die for the sake of a little less flab on her belly. We wouldn’t be borrowing money by the thousands to get our faces cut up and our breasts filled with plastic pouches.
Perhaps the patriarchy had something to do with all of it way back when. But we’re long past the time for laying the blame on anyone except women themselves.
If we stopped buying the magazines that exist to make us feel inadequate, there soon wouldn’t be any. If we quit buying teeny-tiny vials of vastly overpriced creams to dab on our unstoppable wrinkles, we could feed the planet with the money saved. If we aged with grace instead of desperation, whole industries would collapse overnight.
Just say no, ladies. There’s no beauty to be found at the end of a knife.

The upside of aging
Dec. 22, 2006

There’s no avoiding the gravitus of a birthday ending in zero. I’ve just marked a big one, 50, but they’ve all been notable in their own way.
When I turned 20, I felt the weight of no longer being a kid anymore. Like it or not, life was underway. At 30 - the only really tough one for me - I had to give up on a dearly held belief that I’d have everything sorted out by the time I was 30.
Then came 40, and I was OK with it. I’d won and lost on a number of big life fronts by then, but was ultimately happy with where the fates had carried me. Ten years on, the feeling of personal peace is that much stronger, and I find myself grateful for the gifts of aging.
I’ve been a restless soul for most of my life, always knowing I was looking for something but never too sure what it was. But somewhere in the last decade, I think I must have found it.
It didn’t arrive with fury and splendour, and was more like a gradual unfolding. People’s opinions of me no longer mattered as much. I gave up wanting to be the belle of the ball. I settled down. Something like contentment occasionally settled over me.
A psychology type like Maslow would no doubt say that I was finally getting my needs met. Sure, but first you have to stick it out long enough just to be able to identify them. For the longest time, my needs rattled around namelessly inside me, wreaking havoc with the various life plans I tested over the years.
To let go of all that unfocused striving and yearning has been the wonder of aging. Nothing wrong with a little striving and yearning, of course, but nothing wrong with being done with it, either.
I suppose it’s about being on the other side of all of life’s big milestones. Marriage. Children. Careers. Houses. Great loves. You spend your first 40 years trying to make all of that happen, and it isn’t until 50 that you finally get the opportunity to just enjoy what you have.
Time also assumes greater meaning as you age, as it ought to when you consider how each day that passes accounts for a larger percentage of the life you have left to live. Two days lost to unpleasantness at age 20 is a much more significant loss at age 50, when every day counts that much more.
Perhaps that’s the most important lesson of aging: That life slips away faster and faster. I find myself grabbing the days with calculated enthusiasm. I’ve miles to go before I sleep, as the saying goes, and a single wasted hour now seems a shame.
I’ve even worked out the number of weekends I can expect to enjoy if I’m lucky enough to live to 75 or 80. Once, when I narrowed the category to “summer weekends,” I was devastated by how few remained. It wasn’t a pleasant exercise, but it certainly got my attention. No weekend slips by me unawares anymore.
Because I’m no longer consumed with the chase like I was in my younger years, I have more energy for new interests. In recent months, it’s been kayaking and Taiko drumming, even a few pole-dancing classes. The self-consciousness that would have stopped me in my tracks as a younger woman has been vanquished by the passing years. And how truly wonderful to have it gone.
Lately, I’ve developed a near-obsessive interest in birds, something my youngest daughter says seems to be a trend among people my age. If that’s true, perhaps it stems from a need to revel in what’s good about the world, right there outside our windows.
I watch my own adult children struggling, and find myself advising them to hang in there until things can get better in their 40s. The worst of it is that you’re convinced for all those years that it’s only you that can’t figure things out. It must be far more intense for today’s young adults than it was when I was younger, what with ever-rising expectations on each coming generation to run faster, jump higher, try harder and earn a lot more money.
I can’t say that I ever relished the thought of turning 50 during the years of rushing forward into my future. But now that it’s here, I see that it comes in peace. The loss of tight jawline and taut midriff aside, I can tell that 50 wants the best for me.
This past weekend, with the December sun slanting across the waters of Portage Inlet, I kayaked in great happiness past rafts of wintering ducks, snatching up my damp binoculars at regular intervals to categorize the distant specks into bufflehead, golden eye, hooded merganser. An unfamiliar feeling took hold: Serenity.
Peace in my time. If that’s what it means to grow old, bring it on.